paper parcel, which he carried across the lawn to the kitchen door. He entered the house without knocking.
'Who's there?' The husky quaver came from a room inside.
Pike didn't reply, but he walked from the kitchen through a hallway into a small parlour at the front of the cottage where an old woman sat by the lace-netted window nursing a fat tabby.
'Is that you, Mr Grail?' The eyes she turned towards him were covered with a greyish film. In spite of the heat she wore a woollen shawl tucked over the shoulders of her faded quilted gown. 'I was expecting you last week.'
'I couldn't come, Mrs Troy,' Pike said, in his cold voice. 'I had to work.'
'I ran out of tea.' The timid voice held a note of apology. 'I had to borrow some from Mrs Church.'
Pike frowned. 'You should have said you were short.' He saw her flinch at his words and tried to check the natural harshness of his tone. 'I brought you a packet. Plus some shortbread. You asked for that.'
'Did you bring me any fish?' She spoke in a near whisper, turning her face away, as though afraid of his response.
'No.' He was losing patience. Her existence meant nothing to him, beyond the fact that it should continue.
'They don't sell fish where I am,' he lied brutally. 'I brought you eggs and bacon and ham. And bread and rice. I'll put it away in the larder.'
A minute later he was outside again, crossing the lawn to the shed. Had Winifred Troy still possessed her sight she would hardly have recognized the structure.
Pike had replaced the former roof with sheets of corrugated iron, boarded over the single window and fitted a new door equipped with a heavy padlock opened by a key, which he kept about his person at all times.
The shed dated from a time, some years before, when Mrs Troy and her husband, who had since died, had let the cottage to an artist from the city. With their agreement he had built a studio in the small garden and had used the cottage as a weekend retreat and holiday home. By far the most radical alteration Pike had made was to knock down the end wall and install a pair of stable doors in its place. These opened on to the dirt track which ran through the fields and orchards for half a mile before joining a paved road.
Wrinkling his nose at the musty, airless smell, Pike latched the door shut behind him. It was dark in the shed and he lit a paraffin lamp at once. In the artist's day there had been ample illumination from a pair of skylights in the roof, but these had gone. Amos Pike disliked the idea of being overlooked.
The space inside the shed was mainly given over to a large object, covered with a dust cloth, which stood in the middle of the cement floor. Pike removed the cloth with a flick of his wrist: a motorcycle and sidecar were revealed beneath.
The shed quickly grew hot, the radiation of the lamp combining with the hot sun on the corrugated iron roof to turn the room into an oven. Pike took off his shirt. His heavily muscled body bore a number of scars, large and small. He put his holdall on a table and took from it a half-gallon tin of red paint and a pair of brushes. He had bought the paint in a hardware store that morning after having been assured by the salesman that it would adhere to metal. He prised off the lid of the tin with a chisel, spread a sheet of newspaper on the floor and sat down cross- legged. He began to paint over the black bodywork.
His movements were precise and, like all his physical actions, governed by a sense of economy and order.
This pattern of behaviour had been acquired at an early age and was the result of an event in his life so catastrophic he had only been able to continue his existence by recourse to a system of interlocking disciplines that guaranteed him control over his every waking moment.
Tormented for years by the terror and anguish of his dreams, he had lately found them diminished both in power and frequency. While he could not have framed such a thought himself, it was as though his subconscious had finally worn itself out and ceded the battlefield to his iron will.
Having lived with his grandparents for some years, he had gone for a soldier at the age of sixteen and found a way of life ideally suited to his needs, the strict demands of military practice fitting easily into his own more rigorous code. He had prospered to the extent of his capacities and by the time war broke out had already attained the rank of sergeant. For a while he had been employed as an instructor at a training depot, but when his battalion was posted to the front he had assumed his former position as a company sergeant.
Wounded on several occasions, he nevertheless managed to survive in rhe lottery of trench warfare, and the summer of 1917 had found him, now a company sergeant major, engaged with his battalion in the British offensive south of Ypres at the start of the months-long agony that would later be called Passchendaele.
During the bitter struggle for control of the Menin Road, Pike's company had come under heavy fire from the German artillery. Crouched behind a tree stump he saw a man's head blown off as neatly as if it had been hewn with an axe, the trunk stumbling on for several paces before collapsing. Next moment he was flung high into the air by an exploding shell that buried itself in the ground a few yards away.
He awoke to find himself lying in a crater with the battle still raging around him. Concussed and barely conscious, he listened to the fluttering sound of shells as they streamed through the upper air overhead. A great cloud of smoke and dust hung over the battlefield.
He saw men running past him on their way back to the lines, but when he opened his mouth to call to them no sound issued from his lips.
He slept for a few hours, but woke towards evening and realized for the first time that he had received a slight wound to his wrist. Although his limbs were undamaged he found he had no desire to move from where he was, lying on the slope of the crater, staring up at the violet sky. From habit he removed the field dressing sewn into the flap of his tunic and poured iodine into the cut on his wrist. He discovered he still had his water-bottle with him and he drank from it.
At that moment he became aware that he was not alone in the crater. A man from his own company named Hallett lay on the opposite slope, curled up on his side, hugging his blood-soaked tunic. He was calling out faintly, begging for water. Pity had never stirred in the icy heart of Amos Pike, and he watched in silence as the man died.
During the night it began to rain, a hard, driving, relentless downpour, which turned the dry, powdery dust of the battlefield into a quagmire. The battle resumed before dawn. German mortar shells whistled overhead. Smoking clods of earth were flung into the crater. By the blanching flare of a rocket Pike saw troops moving forward weighed down with rolls of wire and pigeon baskets, picks and shovels, but he made no attempt to attract their attention.
Morning came. The body of Hallett had vanished.
He saw nothing but mud all around him. Mud and the stumps of trees, and bodies, or parts of bodies nearby he spied a hand holding a mug, nothing more.
The crater became a lake of liquefied mud and when he dozed off he slid down the slope and had to claw his way back up, covered in clayey ooze. The rain had stopped and presently the sun came out. Pike slept again. When he awoke he discovered that the mud had formed a hard crust about his body. It would have been a simple matter to break it, but he found he was content to lie where he was, immobile, his limbs held fast in the mud's embrace.
He began to review his life, and as he did so a strange image took shape in his mind. He saw himself wrapped in a winding sheet like an Egyptian mummy, unable to move, the prisoner of a rigid and unforgiving regime that was slowly grinding his life to dust.
He felt a fierce urge to break out, to burst his bonds.
Yet the winding sheet spoke to him of death and he knew that if he decided to lie there, unmoving, he would presently die. And that that, too, would be a solution.
He endeavoured to fix his mind on the problem, to come to some kind of decision. As the mud continued to harden about him he heard a sucking sound and Hallett's bloated body surfaced in the crater, coming to rest on the slope beneath his feet. One of the eyes had remained open and it settled on Pike with an accusing glare. He felt an urge to turn away, but found he couldn't do so without cracking the shell of mud coating his neck and jaw. Part of him wished to stay as he was, stiff and unmoving; another part longed for release.
Early next morning a pair of stretcher-bearers found him and brought him back to the British lines, still encased in his suit of mud. He was put in the hands of a medical orderly, who freed him by tapping at the shell with a cook's ladle as though he were cracking an egg, peeling off the covering a piece at a time.
